An Accident in August

By Laurence Cossé and Alison Anderson

“The August 31, 1997, car crash that claimed the life of Princess Diana propels Cossé’s gripping psychological thriller.” —Publishers Weekly

Fourteen years after the accident that cost the lives of Lady Diana, Dodi al Fayed, and Henri Paul, one person involved in the tragedy remains unidentified: the driver of a white Fiat Uno that was in the Alma tunnel at the time of the accident. In Cossé’s spellbinding novel, the driver of this car, a young French woman on her way home from work that fatal night, sees her life thrown into turmoil when, scared and alone, she flees the scene. While there are no immediate repercussions resulting from her flight, as news of the event spreads and TV stations, papers and radio talk of nothing else for weeks, she is assailed by a growing sense of guilt. Terrified of being found out, questioned, arrested, and thrown headfirst into a media whirlwind, she finds herself paralyzed by fear, paranoia, and a growing sense of remorse. When finally it seems she has evaded both the police and the media spotlights, a mysterious man appears who will force her into a decision that will dramatically change her life.

Wonderfully paced, suspenseful and dramatic, An Accident in August is the story of an ordinary person radically altered by her chance involvement in an extraordinary event.

“The psychological issues [Cossé] raises are telling and true.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Cossé springs a nice ironic twist as a final flourish. Readers who enjoy the woman-in-peril genre may find themselves biting a few nails in delicious anguish.” —MostlyFiction Book Reviews

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Aug 30, 2011
• ISBN: 9781609451301

Laurence Cossé

Laurence Cossé’s A Novel Bookstore (Europa Editions, 2010), her ninth novel and an Indie Bound bestseller, was described by the San Francisco Chronicle as “marvelous and stimulating.” She was a journalist and critic before devoting herself entirely to fiction. She lives in France.

Book preview

Part One

The worst of it, thought Lou, is that I could just as easily have stopped.

She turned off the ignition. She leaned her head back against the headrest, and shut her eyes at last. Behind her the garage door was closing with a quiet mechanical purr. Then it was silent. Lou felt her heart pounding, her heart and her arteries, all through her torso, in her neck, in her head, a terrible throbbing growing ever more violent.

Has my heart been pounding like this ever since I left the tunnel? Could I have driven all the way from Paris in this state? At that speed?

She opened her eyes. Her headlights were still on. She looked to the right, to the left, listening for any sounds. But the silence was total, and the door was completely closed. She was alone. She hadn’t been followed. Perhaps they hadn’t even gotten her license number.

The motorcycle was in its usual place, to the right of the car, against the breeze-block garage wall. Yvon would be asleep. Lou looked at her watch. It was ten minutes to one. Or he might also have decided to wait up for her, maybe he was immersed in one of his sailing magazines, reading the technical pages over and over.

I don’t feel like seeing him tonight. I wish he weren’t there. I don’t want to talk to him. Whether he’s asleep or not, I wish he were somewhere else.

This wasn’t the first time Lou would have liked to find no one there when she got home, the way it used to be. But tonight she absolutely had to go to bed without seeing anyone or saying anything. She would wait a minute for her heart to stop pounding, and to be sure Yvon was sound asleep.

She suddenly realized her left elbow was aching. Maybe she’d hurt herself, too. It wasn’t like it was a huge collision, but what difference does that make? The other car sideswiped me, and I was terrified, I jumped. I must have moved to the right. So it’s my right elbow that should be hurting.

Was it then, no, probably just before, yes, it must have just before the collision that Lou had swerved, she couldn’t remember which direction. Probably the wrong way, to the left. Which is why they sideswiped me—she had thought, This is it—that black mass surging up on her, first alongside then pulling away again when Lou thought it was all over. Think . . . Did I say to myself, This is it, at the time, or afterwards? For half an hour now she’d been reliving the scene, over and over. It all happened so fast, the car bearing down on her at breakneck speed, at the entrance to the tunnel, then scraping alongside her with that metallic crunch, and moving away again, so fast, then zigzagging, ricocheting first to the left, then to the right, and finally ramming into one of the central pillars with an almighty crash.

And I stepped on the gas. Whether there had been any other cars just then in the tunnel, Lou couldn’t say. There must have been some, it was only just after midnight, and before she descended into the hole Lou had been driving slowly and she’d seen a fair amount of traffic in Paris.

But all she could remember of the tunnel was that monster suddenly looming up behind her, making her jump, then scraping the side of her car, heading crab-like off to the left, to the right, and crashing there before her eyes; all she could see was the car embedded in its pillar, that awful squeal of brakes, crunch of metal, and a smell of something burning; the pillar plowing through the hood of the car all the way to the windshield.

Lou could not have said whether there were any passengers in the wrecked car, she’d put her foot on the gas and hightailed it out of there. Now it was her turn to drive like a maniac, she’d left the tunnel at full speed with only one thought on her mind, to get out of there. On her mind, or more precisely in the paralyzed muscles of her right calf, her foot on the floor, one thing only, get out of there.

She saw the overhead light getting brighter in the garage, regaining its usual strength. She was losing it, she had to manage to get to her bed somehow, and quickly. She took a deep breath and opened the car door. She wondered if her legs would carry her, but she managed to stand up without any problem. She took a step away from the Fiat and stopped. The body was scraped all along its side—a shiny, almost completely straight streak a good inch wide. Lou held her hand out without daring to touch it, just following its trace from the driver’s door all the way back to the left rear fender. And there she paused again. There was nothing left of her red taillight, neither the box nor the bulb, just a few shards of Plexiglas still clinging to the metal frame. The turn signal light was still there. The bumper was intact.

How on earth could I have imagined I’d gotten away scot-free? If my taillight is broken, it is from the collision, so the bits are still back there in the tunnel. And the scratch on the car, there’ll be the same scratch on the right-hand side of the car that crumpled up against its pillar fifty yards ahead of me.

Lou stood there for a moment, stiff as a statue. She forced herself to move, to look away. I’ll get out of this. I’ll take it in for repairs first thing tomorrow. It’s no big deal to put in a new taillight, give it a streak of paint. No big deal at all.

She walked slowly up all three floors. Anything rather than call the elevator and wake up the building. She opened the door to the apartment, closed it behind her and stood there in the dark for a minute without moving. Yvon would call out to her, if he was awake. Lou couldn’t hear anything. She turned on the light. Nothing. Yvon had piled up his gear for the outing to Les Mureaux tomorrow, a sports bag, the jib he’d been working on so meticulously for the last two days, a pair of pliers, a box of Bre­ton sugar cookies. Renan was supposed to come and pick up his brother with the car at eight o’clock and in principle Lou was going with them. She shook her head. No, guys, I won’t be coming with you after all. I’ve got other stuff to do tomorrow. She put her bag on the floor, too, and went straight into the bathroom.

In the mirror she looked strangely normal. There was something odd about her, but her face was normal. The bathroom light seemed more garish than usual. She had no cuts, no bruises. No marks on the elbow that was hurting.

She started washing. Someone must have gotten hurt in that accident, for sure. Or even killed. The black car was going ninety miles an hour at least. She shouldn’t be too optimistic, someone must have seen her Fiat. Maybe they even have a photo of her at the wheel. They would look for her. There were all those pieces of her taillight on the ground.

Calm down. Just calm down. It will all be fixed tomorrow. Change the brake light and touch up the paint, it won’t take all day. Tomorrow evening there won’t be a trace left. The Fiat will be in perfect condition.

Lou switched on the radio, some music, then switched it off again. She’d been driving so calmly through Paris, it was a balmy night, she had a whole day ahead of her to rest, a summer Sunday—the last Sunday in August. She was heading into the tunnel, going—what? Thirty miles an hour? She didn’t like to drive fast, and then it was like switching to a horror film, that speeding car suddenly right there behind her, the bump, the scrape, the squealing brakes, the horrible crunch, it all happened so quickly, and she got out of there fast as she could.

Luckily Yvon wouldn’t be taking his motorbike in the morning. There was no reason for him to go down to the garage and notice the damage before he left the house. And an hour after he left . . . Lou sat on the edge of the bathtub. Her heart was beating fast again. An hour after Yvon leaves, tomorrow, it will be Sunday morning—it already is Sunday morning. I won’t find any garages open until Monday.

Guys, I think I will come with you to Les Mureaux after all. The less I hang around here, the better.

She slipped into her bed. Their bed, she couldn’t get used to the idea. She just couldn’t, no way, neither their nor our. Yvon said, the bed. She was as quiet as she could be, but he rolled over with a grunt. She froze. She wanted to avoid him. Go on, Yvon, go away, disappear. We’ll see each other tomorrow. Beat it, Yvon honey. For tonight, at least. Lou couldn’t see his eyes in the dark, she could hardly see his face. But his breathing was regular again. He was asleep.

She stretched out on her back, slowly, inch by inch. Have to sleep, she thought. I’ll do my thinking during the day. Lost cause, her mind was going two hundred miles an hour, her right leg still on the accelerator, she was gripping the wheel with both hands, with her shoulders and back; even her abdominal muscles were squeezed tight in flight. Why, oh why did I drive away? I could have stopped. Normally I would have. I’m the sort of girl who stops, who’s available, whose job it is to be attentive to others. And I stepped on the gas. One thing is for sure, I never thought of stopping, not one second. I was running away. It was my foot that decided, or fear, in any case something that isn’t like me.

And now it was done. A car had crashed before her eyes and instead of stopping Lou had run away. She could always say, I’m not the one who fled, it’s not what I wanted, not anything I did, don’t you see? It all happened without me, and they would reply, Failure to report an accident. Failure to stop and render assistance.

Other people must have stopped. She was the number one witness, but surely not the only one. In the summer there are plenty of cars that go through the Alma tunnel at midnight. The others had stopped, of course, you stop when you witness a serious accident. Everybody will have seen her little Fiat clearing out of there, the only car that did.

The worst of it was that she really could have pulled over. The more she thought about it, the more she saw herself stopping, the first one to do so, calling for help, halting the traffic, doing what had to be done.

It must be two o’clock in the morning at least. Lou had cramps in her calves. She didn’t dare move. She just wished she could be alone tonight—Yvon had moved in three months ago now and she couldn’t get used to it. She wasn’t sorry she had given him the keys, no. She was sorry they’d gone through with it. She missed the months before, when they hadn’t yet decided. She liked calling him, Are you coming for dinner? Or having him call, Shall we have dinner together? Even if it was like that every day, in the end. Now there was nothing to say, nothing to decide, it was done. They have dinner together every day, they sleep together, they have breakfast together. And here I am, someone who likes nothing better than to be alone when I wake up.

If you turn the steering wheel just a little bit to one side, can you force someone off the road? A bump, say, even just a little bump and a car goes crazy, it can swerve to the left or the right and the driver can’t do a thing, right? An insignificant little bump, one taillight, a scratch?

Lou wasn’t even sure, anyway, that she’d turned the wheel to the left. Maybe it was just the opposite, maybe she’d swerved to the right to let the maniac go by.

And that way she would have put her taillight right in his path.

And anyway she wasn’t even sure she’d turned the wheel at all. She had jumped, she remembers moving her hands on the wheel. But it was a sudden movement, just being startled, not necessarily turning the wheel.

She felt like shouting, I didn’t do anything! I was on my way home, at thirty miles an hour, and that’s where I’m at, two hours later, I can’t sleep, I’ve got all these horrible images in my head, and cramps all over my body. I didn’t do anything wrong, being startled isn’t a crime. They came hurtling down on me, and they nearly crashed into me. I’m the one who ought to complain.

At three o’clock she got up and took a Mogadon. She wasn’t going to spend all night waiting for the doorbell to ring and find the gendarmes standing there. If they were going to find her, they would find her, and for the time being she wanted to sleep.

She switched on the overhead light in the kitchen. She was no longer afraid of waking Yvon at this hour. If he asked her what was going on, she would tell him the truth, that she couldn’t sleep, and there was a change of plans for the next day. She tore a sheet of paper from the shopping list pad and wrote, Three A.M. Haven’t slept a wink. Upset stomach, or something. I’ll have to try and recover tomorrow morning. Sorry for canceling on you for Les Mureaux. And she went and stuck the paper on the mirror above the bathroom sink with a piece of scotch tape.

Fortunately it was some sort of serious regatta, that Sunday, a quasi-race with other sailing addicts. Yvon hadn’t asked Lou to man the jib, she was only going along as a spectator.

He roused her from a deep sleep when he got up. She went on pretending to sleep. He liked to get up on his own, too, he would have his coffee, and shave, and then he would come and wake her up. This time he didn’t come, except to close the bedroom door quietly. She heard him leave not long after that. He called the elevator. A car started, outside the building, Renan’s no doubt.

Lou didn’t manage to get back to sleep. What were the odds she’d be found? She was no longer rigid with fear, the way she’d been during the night, a few hours ago. Of course they could identify her car from the fragments of the brake light. And even then, could she be so sure? Aren’t brake lights all more or less the same? In any case, identifying a make of car is one thing, finding the actual car is another. No, that wasn’t the key issue, the main thing would